“Yes?” I said politely, to see if he’d hit me. He didn’t.
“The place, as you call it, is a birdcage. But look up there. That’s where the birds want to be. The free wide sky.”
I watched the birds in spite of myself. I thought about our extended peculiar lives in the slave gangs of the Company. Of going to sleep on ice. Of sliding into the place. Of days in the skin.
“That’s it?” I said eventually. “All you want to tell me?”
“That’s it, that’s all.”
We said our good-byes near the Transfer ramp.
“See you next skin,” I said.
And Haro grinned and walked away.
* * *
Dydoo waved an ear at me as I strolled in, “Had a nice day?”
“Divine.”
Poor mutt. He’d been smoking, two trays full, and spilling over. I refrained from cracks about dog ends. What a life the man led, held in that overcoat of fur and fume. It was a young specimen that died up on the ridge, and the robots found it, cleaned out the disease, did the articulation surgery, and popped in Dydoo. Sometimes, when he gets crazy-mad enough, he’ll bark. I know, I used to help make him. And you know, it isn’t really funny. Bird-cage. Dog-cage.
I got ready for going Back, and Dydoo gave me my shot. I wasn’t bothered today, not fighting or wanting to. I guess I haven’t really been like that for years. The anguish, that had also gone, just a sort of melancholy left, almost nostalgia, for something or other. Beyond the high windows, the night was coming, reflecting on instruments and panels and in the pier-glass, till the lights came up.
“You ready now?” Dydoo peered down at me.
“Go on, lick my face, why don’t you?”
“And put myself off my nice meaty bone? You should be so honored. Say, Scay? Yah know what I’m coming Out as at the end, the new body? Heh? The Hound of the Baskervilles. And I’m gonna get every last one of you half-eyed creeps and-”
Then the switches went over.
One minute you are here, and then you are-there-
I glided free of the lump of lead into the other world.
Three days later (that’s the time they tell me it was) I made history. I spent two hours in my own skin. Yes. My very own battered thirty-five-year-old me. Hey!
My body was due, you see, for someone else, and because of what happened, they dumped me into it first. So they could thump all those questions out at me like a machine-gun. The Big Wrench. Then Dydoo yelping and growling, techies from C Block, some schmode I didn’t know yelling, and a whole caboodle full of machines. I couldn’t help much, and I didn’t. In the end, after all the lie-check tests and print-outs and threats and the apologies for the threats, I reckon they believed me that it was nothing to do with me. And then they left me to calm down in a little cubicle, to get over my own anger and my grief.
He was a knight, Haro Fielding. A good guy. He could have messed it up with muck, that borrowed skin, or thrown it off a rock or into one in a jeep, and smashed it up, unusable. Instead, he donated it, one surplus body, back to the homeless ones, the Rest of Us. All they had to do was fill it up with nice new blood, which is easy with the technology in town here.
He’d gone up into the Rockies, sat down, and opened every important vein. The blood went out like the sea and left the dry beach of Haro lying under the sky, where the searchers found him-it. They searched because he was missing. He hadn’t turned up at Transfer next day. They thought they had another battling hysteric on their hands. No use to try transfer now, obviously. The body had been dead long enough the ego and all the other incorporeal etc. were gone. Though the body was there, Haro was not.
The slightest plastic surgery would take care of the knife cuts. One fine, bonus, vacant skin. He was a gentleman, that louse.
God knows how long he’d been planning it, preparing for it in that dedicated, clear-vision crusader sort of way of his. Quite a while. And I know, if I hadn’t met him Out that day, the first I’d ever have heard of it would have been from some drunk sprawled in the Star Bar, Hey, you hear? Fielding took himself out.
As it was, obliquely but for sure, Haro’d told me all of it. I should have cottoned on and tried to- Or why should I have? Each to his own. In, or is it Out? For keeps.
And I guess it’s grief and anger made me laugh so hard in the calm-down cubicle. God bless the Company, and let’s hear it for the one that got away. As the line says, flying to other ills-but flying. Home free.
Free as a bird.